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Higher education

As the nation heard that Curiosity had successfully traveled 354 million miles to land on Mars Aug. 6, Mitchell Campion, a student at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minn., was studying iron oxide and Mars magnetization with Thelma Berquó, visiting assistant professor of physics. They are trying to produce a particular iron oxide that may exist on the surface of Mars and could be "useful for magnetic media storage—like hard drives," Campion said. "It would also fill in the holes in certain archeological material ...." In related news, Concordia physics professor Heidi Manning is working with a NASA team studying the data sent by the Curiosity rover.